Gun control and history: It’s never been about the Second
Amendment

In a 2016 infomercial recently unearthed by
NBC's Chuck Todd, President Donald Trump's eldest son can be
seen testing out a silencer on several guns, then waxing poetic
about the importance of the Second Amendment.

"I mean, the Second Amendment for us, for me, it's not just a
passion and a hobby that I do every weekend. I mean, it's a
lifestyle. It's the thing that our Founding Fathers thought of
right after free speech and religion," Donald Trump Jr. solemnly
intoned.

References to the sanctity of the Second Amendment are
practically inescapable whenever Americans today try to discuss
gun regulation. If the opponents of gun control are to be
believed, the issue is simply one of either respecting or not
respecting the Constitution (or whatever fake quotes from the
Founding Fathers they can dredge up). Raise the prospect of
imposing even modest regulations — such as banning semiautomatic
weapons or strengthening background checks — and you'll
immediately hear the Second Amendment whipped out like the
ultimate trump card (no pun intended).

Yet until relatively recently in American history, the notion
that all forms of gun control threatened Americans'
constitutional rights simply didn't exist. When that did become
popular in the late 20th century, it wasn't due to a renaissance
in strict constitutional construction, but as a sop to paranoid
right-wing fantasies.

Run your fingers through the judicial history of gun control
efforts and a few prominent cases and laws rise to the fore. In
the Kentucky case Bliss v. Commonwealth in 1822, a Kentucky
court ruled that the state government did not have the right to
curtail individuals' abilities to bear arms (in that case a
concealed sword cane) because the Second Amendment was an
individual right. Twenty years later, however, a higher court in
Arkansas ruled in the case of State v. Buzzard that "the words
'a well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a
free State,' and the words 'common defense' clearly show the
true intent and meaning of these Constitutions and prove that it
is a political and not an individual right, and, of course, that
the State, in her legislative capacity, has the right to
regulate and control it."

You may have noticed that the ruling directly quoted the cryptic
language of the Second Amendment itself:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a
free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall
not be infringed.

It makes more sense when you consider that the Second Amendment
was written with this passage of the Constitution in mind:

The Congress shall have Power ... To raise and support Armies,
but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer
Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy; To make
Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval
Forces; To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the
Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions
...

So the Second Amendment, when placed into the context of Article
1, Section 8 of the Constitution, was intended to make sure that
American citizens could participate in militias rather than have
a standing army. The founding fathers did indeed want every
white male to own a gun (even passing the Militia Act of 1792 to
require gun ownership), but only for that specific purpose.

Considering that America today has one of the most powerful
standing armies in the world, it is safe to say that this logic
belongs to an obsolete era.

It is also worth noting that the founding fathers did not
believe that everyone had a right to own a gun:
African-Americans, whether enslaved or free, were not allowed to
own guns. Neither were white people who didn't swear loyalty to
the patriot cause.

It's easy to forget that the Second Amendment does not simply
state that people have a right "to keep and bear arms," but that
their ability to do so draws on the founders' belief that "a
well regulated militia" was "necessary to the security of a free
state." While some courts have argued that this automatically
meant that the ability to own guns was an individual right, that
interpretation was not nearly as absolute in the minds of early
19th-century jurists — who were the first to grapple with the
implications of the founders' core documents — as it is among
conservatives today.

Subsequent court cases and laws reinforced this notion. In the
1875 Supreme Court case United States v. Cruikshank, the court
found that the Second Amendment only limited the powers of the
national government, with state governments being permitted to
regulate firearms as they saw fit. By 1934, the National
Firearms Act was passed to sharply curtail the types of guns
that ordinary citizens could own, as a method of fighting
organized crime. This happened with the full support of the
National Rifle Association, whose president at the time, Karl
Frederick, argued that the need to regulate firearms "lies in an
enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative
action" and "is not to be found in the Constitution." Five years
later, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court judge's effort
to deem the National Firearms Act unconstitutional.

Perhaps the most striking moment in the history of the gun
control movement came with the events that led to the passage of
the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and Gun Control
Act of 1968. After the Black Panther movement made headlines by
openly brandishing firearms on the street to stop police
officers from violating the rights of African-Americans,
California Gov. Ronald Reagan threw his weight behind a state
law called the Mulford Act of 1967 that imposed harsh new gun
control measures. As Reagan put it, there was "no reason why on
the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons,"
and he argued that guns were a "ridiculous way to solve problems
that have to be solved among people of good will."

By 1968, the Panthers' notoriety, along with the assassinations
of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, prompted the
passage of the two aforementioned gun control measures. The laws
imposed stricter licensing requirements on gun dealers and
barred certain individuals from owning firearms, including
convicted felons, drug users, minors and individuals with mental
illnesses.

The Black Panthers' assertion of their gun control rights was
pivotal for another reason. Not only did it spur the passage of
a major gun control law, it also clearly demonstrated that the
right's opposition to gun control legislation has never really
been about a fealty to constitutional principles.

Less than a decade after Reagan argued that it was "ridiculous"
for people to walk around packing heat, he changed his tune. In
large part, the impetus was a 1977 coup within the NRA, with
right-wingers seizing control of the organization from its
traditional leaders, who viewed it as more of a sportsmen's
club. Led by a journalist named Neal Knox, the new NRA leaders
staked out a passionately anti-government course, depicting gun
control legislation — in particular, the creation of the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — as part of a sinister liberal
agenda. As Knox himself put it when describing the 1960s:

Is it possible that some of those incidents could have been
created for the purpose of disarming the people of the free
world? With drugs and evil intent, it’s possible. Rampant
paranoia on my part? Maybe. But there have been far too many
coincidences to ignore.

From there, the rest of the story seems practically inevitable.
Once "gun ownership" was equated with toughness on crime rather
than the perpetuation of it, and with preventing racial equality
rather than furthering it, hating the federal government rather
than protecting it, and defying liberalism in general ... Well,
at that point, it became inevitable that the newly-politicized
NRA would take the lead against all manner of gun control
legislation, from the Brady Bill of 1993 and the Federal Assault
Weapons Ban of 1994 to President Barack Obama's unsuccessful gun
control efforts after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

What's more, thanks to the rise of Ronald Reagan (whom the NRA
backed once he foreswore his previous support for gun control),
the NRA's doctrine of Second Amendment fundamentalism was
quickly adopted by the mainstream conservative movement. The
rest, as they say, is history.

This isn't to say that the original and more nuanced
interpretation of the Second Amendment has gone completely by
the wayside. Even when the Supreme Court ruled in the 2008 case
Dean v. Heller that the Second Amendment does guarantee an
individual right to bear arms, Justice Antonin Scalia
acknowledged that "like most rights, the Second Amendment right
is not unlimited," citing concealed weapons laws and
prohibitions against firearm ownership by felons and the
mentally ill as examples.
At the same time, all sense of nuance has been completely lost
from the public discourse about gun control politics over the
last 40 years. As a result, we live in a society where the
slippery slope fallacy has become commonplace in our political
discourse (i.e., the notion that if you impose even mild
regulations on firearms, it will lead to mass confiscation of
weapons) and in which toxic masculinity costs thousands of lives
every year.

That last point really needs to be emphasized. When discussing
gun control with contemporary conservatives, you will frequently
hear the maxim that the best antidote to a bad guy with a gun is
a good guy with a gun. Or you'll hear that ordinary citizens
need to be able to own firearms in order to stop a tyrannical
government — an absurd notion since, by that logic, individuals
would need access to nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass
destruction just to even the score.

In short, we live in an era when toxic masculinity and
right-wing nonsense has overwhelmed what used to be a more
reasonable discussion about gun control. The Second Amendment,
instead of being used as our founding fathers intended, has been
ripped out of context and used to endanger the lives of millions
of Americans.